The computing community of China needs to be connected with the
English computing market. This has to start with a minimal set
of English words for computing. Such a set can be selected from
a computing environment especially designed for total communication
among all parties involved. These parties include not only just the
the english users but also the chinese users, who have sufficient
familiarity with the selected set of around 1000 words.
But that's not enough. We have neglected the most important party.
In computing, the computer is the most important party. So, the
key feature of this set is that it's the language used by the computer
to talk to us. Besides just the front end user interface, it's
the language for doing programming.
This brings us to natural-language programming. Well, we are talking
about an automated software-engineering environment. In this
environment, another party turn out to be much more important than the
computer's natural programming language. It's the software robots.
Software robots can be considered as the internal residents of the
computing environment. They are nothing but verbatim recordings of
all the interaction between users and computers. But this recordings
are made to perform exactly the interactions that they recorded.
So the computing language is also used for communication among
users, natural-language programming tools and software robots.
Anyway, this is ROBACUS. It stands for robotic abacus. It's designed
to allow a chinese computer user to do essentially anything he wants
on a computer. But most of all, now all his work can be communicated
to an English user, and vice versa.
ROBACUS has been developed and tested since 1970. It has been applied
to anything from ping pong match analysis to space nuclear design.
It has four major components: user interface, natural langauge,
diagnoser and editor. At present, it's operational on a redhat
linux 7.3, using only fortran, c and xwindows. Besides the
minimization of English, ROBACUS also minimize the set of fortran
(30 rultes), c(20 rules only to be familiarized), xwindow(also 20
familiarized rules) and unix commands(10).
I developed ROBACUS to be the first,not only licenseless, but also
authorless, software package. If you can spare 5 gigs of harddisk
on your computer, I can send you 4 cds(3 linux redhat3.7, 1 robacus)
to test drive ROBACUS, which would normally take half hour.